Here was a story so glorious that even my teenage cynicism could do little to tarnish it, a story in which I could cast myself, vicariously, among the heroines. Back in the 1700s, my own ancestors had left Europe, crossed a perilous ocean, and faced a wild continent rather than betray their heart’s convictions. My dad’s people had been Swiss Anabaptists who, in a quest for religious freedom, had fled first to Pennsylvania, then (as pacifist refugees from the American Revolution) to Upper Canada, and finally as pioneers to Alberta. My mom’s family, though on the opposite side of the religious controversy, had followed a similarly convoluted path. They were Roman Catholics who, forced from Portugal and then England, had settled in Maryland in the 1600s. When that refuge also failed them, they had resumed their migration, heading inland to settlements in Kentucky and then Missouri, before they too made the trek to the Canadian prairies.
Both lines had held strong to their religious convictions until the early 1900s, when at opposite ends of Alberta, my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother had each broken with tradition by marrying outsiders. In other essentials, however, even these renegades remained true to the family heritage as they devoted their lives to bringing the prairie under cultivation and laying the groundwork of community life.
My parents had both grown up on homesteads, and my sisters and I used to beg our mother for stories of her childhood, as fabulous to us as Greek myths. Imagine riding to school on horseback or making butter with a stoneware churn or lying in the grass, watching fleets of flat-bottomed clouds float overhead. These borrowed memories came back to me here in Eastend, in the company of friendly ghosts, and especially during evenings in the Stegner House, itself a vestige of the pioneer era. Curled up on the couch in a pool of lamplight, with a dog at my feet, I again opened Wolf Willow, looking for confirmation of these honeyed stories.
What I found instead was an atmosphere of melancholy that I hadn’t noticed in my earlier encounters with the book. “By most estimates,” Stegner confessed in his opening chapter, “including most of the estimates of memory, Saskatchewan can be a pretty depressing country.” 1 Despite his rapturous reappraisal of the landscape a few pages later—“grassy, clean, exciting”—his memories were permeated by a sour whiff of disappointment. Stegner’s father had been a hard-luck gambler, a man who staked his family’s future on 320 acres of sun-scorched, wind-scoured prairie a hard day’s drive south of town and who then, through the consecutive misfortunes of wheat rust, fire, and drought, had lost the toss. “My father did not grow discouraged,” Stegner recalled, “he grew furious. When he matched himself against something he wanted a chance to win. By 1920 he was already down in Montana scouting around for some new opportunity.” 2 The family left for Great Falls the following year and then for Salt Lake City, where they settled in like a wind-blown drift of Russian thistles.
During their sojourn in Saskatchewan, the Stegners had spent summers on the homestead and winters in this house. It was here that, by Stegner’s report, the entire family had nearly died in 1918 of the Spanish flu; here also that, in his words, “my grandmother ‘went crazy’ and had to be taken away by a Mountie to the Provincial asylum because she took to standing silently in the door of the room where my brother and I slept—just hovered there for heaven knows how long before someone discovered her watching and listening in the dark.” 3 In the cozy kitchen a few paces from where I sat reading, Stegner’s father had once “clouted [him] with a chunk of stove wood,” sent him flying across the room, and broken his collarbone. The shadows cast by the lamp seemed to deepen, and the silence gathered as I read; these traumas were too close for comfort.
Fortunately for my peace of mind, the members of the Eastend Arts Council had provided another account of the settler experience that struck a more cheerful note. A weighty volume, bound in green and emblazoned with gold, too large for the bookshelves upstairs, it was tucked away with the phone book on the telephone table. Entitled Range Riders and Sodbusters, it had been published by the local historical society in 1984 as a tribute to “our” pioneers. “We record these stories with awe,” the editors wrote, aware “that this area had its definite beginnings in these stories never again to be relived and an era in history never to be repeated.” 4
Completely typical of the genre—books like this one had been compiled in communities across the prairies as the old-timers began to fade, including a couple that featured members of my own family—it consisted of capsule biographies of the founding fathers and, somewhat grudgingly, the founding mothers of the area. Who could resist the smiling faces that gazed shyly out of these pages or their stories of heroic determination?
One of the pictures that caught my eye showed an atypically somber-faced man in a three-piece suit, standing aslant to the camera and clasping the hand of a sturdy woman with back-swept hair and a foursquare stance. Their names were Edmond and Marie Nibus. As Marie proceeds to explain, they had come to Canada from Belgium in 1912, along with their five-year-old son, and arrived on their homestead, in the middle of a blizzard, the following autumn. Their first home on the prairie was a two-room shack, punctured with knot holes and furnished with little more than a stove, a table, and a bunch of apple boxes. “It had a brand new board floor,” Marie recalled, “and I thought it was wonderful.”
“Life on a homestead had a lot of hardships,” she continued. “I think young ones are spoiled nowadays. Many were the days that I’d go out and disc with four horses. I had to take [son] Leon with me and he sat on my knees while I drove. We’d stay out from morning till evening, then figured that the horses needed a rest.” 5 (Ed, meanwhile, was working for neighbors to earn some much-needed cash.) A note at the end of the entry informs us that Marie and Ed lived and worked on their farm until 1954, when they retired into town. They died there, aged 94 and 101 respectively, in the early 1970s, shortly after celebrating their sixty-fourth wedding anniversary.
I spent hours leafing through the volume, with its tales of runaway horses and broken machinery, lightning strikes and blizzards, good crops and bad, all animated by a surprising lightness of spirit. Even the 1918 influenza epidemic, which had taken the lives of so many and left a bruise on Wallace Stegner’s thoughts, could be construed as having unexpected benefits. “There was an atmosphere of ‘togetherness’ . . . that united the community,” one survivor recalled. “Truly these folks were the best in the world.” 6 Reading between the lines, it appeared that this same togetherness had helped to bring the community through the terrible thirties drought. “With no crops, no money, in debt and on relief, times were hard,” one old-timer admitted, “but we got along somehow . . . There were picnics, dances and parties. The women would bring lunch and the men paid a quarter. Part of this bought the coffee, and the fiddlers were given the rest.” 7
Hard work and fiddle tunes, bread and roses. Through sheer stick-to-it-iveness, these dauntless people had created not only farms and ranches but also churches, libraries, hospitals, and schools. They had played in dance bands, organized Christmas concerts, and planned community fairs; they had raised flocks of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Even though I had never met any of these people, I recognized them as my own. Here I was in Eastend, home away from home.
One morning, Keith and I decided to treat ourselves to breakfast at Eastend’s premiere dining establishment. Jack’s Café is on the main drag, a couple of doors up from the late-and-lamented antler museum. Very much a going concern, it is nonetheless also a blast from the past, complete with a soda fountain, a glass cabinet full of pies, and, on the wall, one of those old-fashioned rotary displays that flips from ad to ad. Fabrics and Notions, flip. Livestock Hauling, flip. Septic Service, flip. One of the oldest surviving businesses in town (a tidbit I had picked up from the local history book), it had been founded by immigrants from the Peloponnese, of all places, around 1920 and then lovingly passed down, from hand to hand, to a succession